Autumn LeavesSinatra Song of the Century #68

Victor Borge and Frank Sinatra at Radio City in 1983 - before the autumn leaves started to fall

A truly great song for the season isn't about the calendar, or the weather. It's about the seasons of life and love. In the Sinatra songbook:

Spring Is Here
Why doesn't my heart go dancing?

But then:

The Things We Did Last Summer
I'll remember all winter long...

You bet:

The autumn wind and the winter wind
Have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days
Go on and on...

Of course, if you're not a young man in love, spring fever may pass you by, and, if you're in late middle age, the summer may be no more likelier a prompter of romance than mid-November. Yet there is one great seasonal signifier that almost everyone responds to. You don't have to be moonstruck or in love at all to feel a certain melancholy when autumn nips the air, as it does this very week:

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The Autumn Leaves
Of red and gold...

It's an image that reminds you of the cruel remorselessness of time, even in my part of the world - northern New England - where the foliage blazes brightest, red and gold and orange, just before it falls and dies. Autumn leaves are a reminder of mortality, and decline, and loss:

Across the Atlantic, a fellow called Michael Goldsen was running Capitol Records' publishing division. He happened to love French songs, and he asked Serge Glickson, Capitol's rep in Paris, to keep him up to speed on what was popular with Gallic music lovers. "He sent me a pile of records this high," said Goldsen. "And I listened to them, and I heard one song, I think Edith Piaf had recorded, called 'Les feuilles mortes'. And I listened a minute, and I said, 'Oh, man, this is the greatest song I've ever heard.'"

Goldsen had his rep in Paris track down the publisher, and they made a deal. Capitol would get the US rights to the song for $600. That seems a modest sum, but Goldsen still had to get authorization from the guy running the company, Jim Conkling. "If you think it's good," Conkling told him, "we'll give him the money." Aside from the 600 bucks, the French publisher also required Capitol to come up with an English lyric within four months.

No big deal. Mickey Goldsen took "Les feuilles mortes" to the president of Capitol Records â€“ Johnny Mercer. "Johnny, I've got a killer song for you," said Goldsen. And Mercer agreed: it was a good song and he'd be happy to come up with some words en anglais. And next thing the publishing exec notices the four months are almost up, and there's still no lyric. "Hey, John," he said. "I've only got three weeks to go and I lose the song."

Goldsen couldn't see what the big deal was. "It wasn't a big song," he said. "To me, it sounded like you could write that in 20 minutes, you know?" Mercer might have pointed out to his colleague that it took him a year to put a lyric to Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark". Instead, he told him he was going to New York on Friday and, if Goldsen would drive him to the station, he'd write the words on the train and mail 'em back to Los Angeles. Come the big morning, Goldsen got delayed en route and was running maybe ten minutes late. "So I drove up to his house, and I see him sitting on the steps of his house, and I walked up, and I said, 'Gee, John, I'm awfully sorry I'm late.'"

And Mercer looked up and replied, "Well, you know, I didn't know if something had happened, so while I was waiting, I wrote the lyric. Here it is." And he handed him an envelope, on the back of which were some scribbled words beginning:

The falling leaves
Drift by the window
The Autumn Leaves
Of red and gold

I see your lips
The summer kisses
The sunburned hands
I used to hold...

"As I'm driving, he read it to me," recalled Goldsen, "and tears came to my eyes. It was such a great lyric... Everything about that lyric was just so, so Mercerish."

Chanson/vivions. Ressemble/ensemble. Mercer, by contrast, uses just two rhymes in the whole lyric: the leaves of "red and gold" are paired with the hands "I used to hold", and then in the song's release:

Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song...

That first line is a nice conceit. The internalization of the landscape (as the literary critics say) is not always perfectly aligned: The days grow short when you reach September (as Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill observed), and they're shorter still in October. But not if you're lovesick, and they're dragging by.

Mercer knew the imagery was strong enough that it didn't need to be underpinned by a lot of rhymes, and the song concludes on an unrhymed word that underlines the season:

But I miss you most of all, my darling
When Autumn Leaves start to fall.

And that's it. Yet, before we get too autumnal and melancholy, it's worth recalling Ian Fleming's aside in his 1956 James Bond novel, Diamonds Are Forever. 007 is on assignment at a London hotel:

As Bond neared the end of the corridor he could hear a piano swinging a rather sad tune. At the door of 350 he knew the music came from behind it. He recognized the tune. It was 'Feuilles mortes'. He knocked.

Most Americans got to know "Autumn Leaves" a year before James Bond went padding down the corridor of the Trafalgar Palace in Diamonds Are Forever â€“ the fall of 1955. That October, Roger Williams' version got to Number One and became one of the biggest-selling instrumental hits of all time, not bad for a fellow who only a couple of years earlier had been a lounge pianist at the Madison Hotel. One afternoon Dave Kapp of Kapp Records walked in, heard the background tinkling, and offered to sign the pianist on condition he change his name from Lou Weertz to "Roger Williams", the founder of Rhode Island, and thus, to Kapp's way of thinking, a name with broad appeal: Take a French surrealist poet, a Hungarian Jew, and a Nebraskan passing himself off as a New England settler, and you've got one coast-to-coast all-American hit. A year later, Autumn Leaves was the title of a Joan Crawford movie, and Nat "King" Cole's ballad treatment over the titles established the template for most singers.

On April 10th 1957 Sinatra walked into Capitol's studios to make his own recording for the album Where Are You? Two days earlier, Sinatra had been there in his capacity as a conductor - conducting Peggy Lee for her wonderful album The Man I Love. Miss Lee's arrangements were by Nelson Riddle. For Where Are You? Sinatra had opted for charts by Gordon Jenkins. So in the space of 48 hours he conducted Nelson Riddle arrangements but sang Gordon Jenkins arrangements. Many Sinatra fans have serious reservations about Jenkins, but Frank never did - and in this case he had an understandable reason for looking beyond Nelson: Nat Cole's definitive ballad arrangement was by Riddle, and Sinatra maybe sensed that giving him a second bite at the foliage was asking lightning to strike the same tree twice.

Where Are You? is a great album that represents Gordon Jenkins' string writing at its very best, but insofar as a few queasier moments creep in they do manifest themselves on Frank's otherwise very beautiful record of "Autumn Leaves". Jenkins' instrumental intro - which makes up a full 25 per cent of the track - is a beautiful and haunting tone poem: you feel the chill in this man's bones before he's sung a word. And then Sinatra enters:

The falling leaves...

It's a more formal reading than Cole's, evening out the syllables, with Frank doing (for him) a very unconversational "the" that seems to attach so much weight you feel the burden of lost love right from the first word.

The blemishes? Jenkins, a lyricist himself, could get a wee bit literal in his orchestrations. If the text mentioned waves, the strings would ripple. For wind, they'd shiver. So, in all the years I've loved this record, I've never been quite sure about the orchestral fills between Frank's lines:

The falling leaves...
[JENKINS MIMICS THE SOUND OF LEAVES GETTING BLOWN ALL OVER THE YARD]
...drift by the window...
[JENKINS' LEAVES RESUME THEIR WINDBLOWN STATE UNTIL FRANK COMES BACK IN]
The autumn leaves...
[LEAVES START DANCING IN THE AUTUMNAL WIND YET AGAIN, ONLY TO FALL SILENT ONCE MORE]
...of red and gold...
[MORE FURIOUS DANCING FOLIAGE]

Etc.

On the next section - "I feel your lips" - Jenkins finally gives up on the old leaf choreography. The dancing leaves come back right at the end but somewhat less obviously and Sinatra's voice melts into them so seamlessly that you don't care. This is a much bleaker, more harrowing account than Nat Cole's. If you want the difference in a single line, compare both singers' approach to "old winter's song": Nat's is almost jaunty, philosophical; Frank's winter lasts forever - "old wiiiiiiiiiinter's song". Nat knows there'll be other loves, Frank has no such expectations.

It's a very short record: 2 minutes and 19 seconds, of which over 45 seconds is intro and outro, leaving barely a minute and a half for one chorus. But it's all you need: as Artie Shaw once said to me in any other context, any more would be less. Sinatra tells his story - and then takes his, er, leave.

Five years later Sinatra was on a world tour for children's charities and "Autumn Leaves" drifted fitfully in and out of the running order. He didn't do it in Paris, perhaps because not all Frenchmen care for Johnny Mercer's anglicization. But he did do it in London, in a version the Pundette favors above the studio record. You can understand why: Jenkins' vast orchestra is replaced by two men - Al Viola on guitar and Harry Klee on flute. And, although Klee attempts to replicate all those dancing leaves, the wind machine is dialed back from eleven to about three. It's a very tender performance, with Sinatra a little more conversational than on the record. As Frank himself once said:

A Johnny Mercer lyric is all the wit you wish you had and all the love you ever lost.

In that Festival Hall performance - especially on the close ("Autumn Leaves start to fall") - he certainly lives up to the latter half of that assessment.

It would be another two decades before the logic of the Jenkins arrangement was taken to its ultimate conclusion. In 1983 Sinatra came to Radio City Music Hall to raise money for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He had a funny man as his opening act: the great Dane, Victor Borge. But Borge was a musical comedian, and Sinatra was a great fan, and someone figured it would be great if they could do a bit together. And, when you're looking for big laughs, what's funnier than "Autumn Leaves", right?

So Borge sat at the piano and Sinatra stood at the microphone, and off they went with the Jenkins chart. And on that first shivery fill after "The falling leaves" ...a leaf started to fall. And another on "drift by the window". And more on "The autumn leaves". Most of them on top of Borge at the keyboard.

And through it all, as Victor's getting buried behind him, Sinatra's the perfect straight man, singing with deadly seriousness - until right at the end, when Borge pushes his piano away from the leaves and cowers underneath it, at which point Frank cracks up.

Gordon Jenkins' windswept arrangement had finally found its perfect interpreter.

You don't have to be literally buried by falling leaves to know what it's like to feel an autumnal melancholy. Most of us at one point or another have felt in an October dusk a shiver in the breeze, a chill in the bones, and connected it to something more than just the turn of the seasons. Of all the songs on his Sinatra tribute album Shadows In The Night, "Autumn Leaves" is the first to show up in Bob Dylan's stage act. You feel it's a commentary not just on age and foliage, but on musical losses, too. Al Schmitt, Dylan's engineer, described how, at the start of each song, the band would assemble in the studio and listen to Sinatra's record:

The thing is he would listen to the song over and over again and get Sinatra's kind of intentions on what he was doing with the song and then he would go in â€” he would only do two or three takes on each tune â€” but he would make it his own. And nothing to do with Sinatra. He just learned what the song was about.

To the point where, like Frank, you're not just singing it, you're living it.

Johnny Mercer said that "Autumn Leaves" brought him more money than any other song in his catalogue. Today it fulfills a similar function for Paul McCartney, whose MPL Communications owns the publishing rights, ensuring that, should everything else dry up, Sir Paul will still be reasonably comfortable when he's 64 ...er, 94. But across the Channel "Les feuilles mortes" evokes among the French not only lost love but a broader loss, a nostalgia for France in the post-liberation years of the mid-Forties, a time when (in hindsight)...